New standards issued for water information

08.11.2016

Standardisation is essential in the geosciences to facilitate exchanges and sharing of information between experts. This is particularly important in the case of water information, which involves many different players from different organisations. The process has been boosted by the "Orléans Resolution" and its adoption of a new family of standards.

To geoscience researchers, but also to the wider community of operational players in the water sector for example, adopting and developing data exchange standards is crucial. Professionals in the water sector not only have very different functions, but are also widely scattered across different agencies (national water agencies, international commissions, research organisations, etc.). It is essential for these different organisations to be able to exchange data easily, especially on hydrology and meteorology. But this demands common protocols and effective system and data interoperability - and there is a lot of work to be done!

Water data: too much time spent locating the right information

Work on standardising international exchanges of information in the geosciences, in which the BRGM has a leading role, began some time ago. And yet, there are still many problems with exchanging water data and system interoperability: when the data presented and exchanged are too heterogeneous, consistency is a problem.

From one area of competence to another, it has been estimated that people spend roughly 30% of their time just to locate and understand the information! This obviously causes considerable complications in specific transboundary cases where organisations in different countries have to share information, for example to predict floods and water table levels.

The "Orléans Resolution": a significant step forward

2015 saw a significant step forward on the standardisation of water data. The "Orléans Resolution" was the highlight of the Open Geospatial Consortium's 6th "Hydrology Domain Working Group" (HDWG) workshop, organised by the BRGM on 20 and 24 September 2015. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) issues international and open standards for geographical information and data processing. These standards are used, for example, in online applications such as Google Earth, Google Maps and InfoTerre, and recommended by the INSPIRE Directive and even the Obama administration.

The annual HDWG workshop is an opportunity for international experts from different backgrounds to work together, exchange experiences, discuss results and advances and develop appropriate standards for exchanges of water data and modelling. The "Orléans Resolution" concludes as follows: "The hydrology committee of the WMO (World Meteorological Organisation) recognises that the standards prepared or incubated by the Hydro Domain Working Group have reached a sufficient stage of maturity to be applied to the WHOS information system of the WMO".

The HDWG itself has recommended the creation of an online portal for the WMO's hydro-information system to facilitate access to the water data services provided by national hydrological agencies, in line with OGC standards.

The API family of standards

In practice, a family of six standards was adopted, for hydrological measurement series, hydrogeological resources, rating curves, water quality, exchanges of observations via API and Internet queries. An Application Programming Interface (API) is a standardised set of semantic and associated tools that enable developers to create software through simple and direct uses of other software services.

The BRGM's teams played a central part in developing the first two standards in the family: co-writing the data models, running test cases and iterative tests with real data, etc. The BRGM thus established a data structure describing the rules for structuring the information, and deployed implementation tools in XML.

These standards for water data are likely to be extended to environmental data.